HOLYOKE -- Homeowners could save money on electricity and heating costs after a study on electric meters ends in December, officials said.

"The researchers are estimating that customers could save from 5 percent to 10 percent on consumption and we hope to validate those estimates with the findings of this study," Manager James M. Lavelle of the Holyoke Gas and Electric (HGE) Department said in an email Wednesday.

The project is funded by a $200,000 grant from the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources, the press release said.

Meters report electronically every five minutes and such detail is being gathered from the first 1,000 homes where the new meters were installed, Lavelle said.

"Currently the meter data is aggregated and passed on to the researchers in anonymous format so that they do not know the meter number or the meter address," Lavelle said.

Data from the meters let the researchers see what appliances, lights and heating and cooling equipment is being used during the day, the press release said.

Researchers in analyzing meter data will look at "occupancy information," which shows when lights and appliances are turned on. Matching the occupancy information with a programming of a thermostat can lead to energy savings of between 5 percent and 10 percent in most cases, Computer Science Prof. Prashant Shenoy said.

He and David Irwin, electrical and computer engineering professor, are leading the study with graduate students.

"This is a one year long project (ends in December) and we are a few months into the project. So far it has gone quite well and our early results from analyzing data look promising," Shenoy said in an email.

The two graduate students on the project are getting doctoral degrees and work on the project is part of their thesis research, he said.

A goal of the project is to see in reviewing electricity use at individual homes where money can be saved. That's where the computing center comes in, the press release said.

The computing center opened in November 2012 on Bigelow Street downtown. Run by major universities like Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the center consists of more than 16,000 computers doing high-speed analysis of data in areas like designing drugs, understanding the formation of galaxies, climate change and other areas.

Besides Harvard and MIT, center partners are UMass, Northeastern University and Boston University, as well as EMC Corp., of Hopkinton, an information storage, backup and recovery firm, and Cisco Systems Inc., a California-based Internet network equipment maker.

The computing center sits on a former industrial site on Bigelow Street downtown overlooking the canals, built there specifically to take advantage of the plentiful energy provided by the HGE's hydroelectric dam.

"HGE is very interested in the study," Lavelle said, "and we are looking forward to analyzing the findings of the researchers in order to help our customers reduce energy consumption and to identify opportunities to lower the our system's peak demand which reduces costs for all customers."